"We'll certainly move towards driverless cars, but we're also talking about electric vehicles and some sort of vehicle-sharing scheme. When we combine those three technologies, we end up with an opportunity to reduce the total number of cars we need for society's mobility, I estimate down to about a third of what we have now."

That means less congested roads, more car parking spaces in the city, less reliance on owning your own car, and an ability for those unable to drive to still take a ride anywhere they want.

So, are we there yet? Are there any cars ready to hit the road and drive us to work?

Volvo, which is part of the coalition, has been touting its autonomous model Concept 26 since last year and at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Sweden said it was also developing clever in-car entertainment systems that could tailor a show length to the duration of a trip, taking traffic into account.

Currently, there's nowhere in the world where you can buy a driverless car and ask it to take you home. When it comes to summarising the roadblocks between now and that future, we'll leave it to Chief Scientist Alan Finkel's Press Club speech:

"Who do we allow to own or direct these cars?

"What happens to all the people who today drive things like trucks and taxis for a living?

"Who builds, and then who takes responsibility, for the sophisticated networks of sensors to support the cars?

"And given that orderly traffic flow depends on the interconnections between the cars and the traffic management software, what happens when a car hits an internet blackspot? Potential catastrophe.

"These are but a fraction of the issues attached to one technology in the immediately foreseeable future.